Gordon Binkerd, 87

Composer excelled at choral music

September 10, 2003|By Angela Rozas, Tribune staff reporter.

His music has been played by orchestras around the world, from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to the Orchestra of America at Carnegie Hall to the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. But those who knew the prolific work of composer Gordon Binkerd said it was his exquisite ability to set poetry to music that will be his legacy.

Mr. Binkerd, 87, a composer and longtime professor at the University of Illinois, died of Alzheimer's disease Friday, Sept. 5, at his Urbana home.

"He was such a literary-minded composer," said David Saladino, a former student of Mr. Binkerd's and choral director at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Ky. "That was really his forte."

Among his many works, Mr. Binkerd published more than 160 choral and vocal pieces, nearly a quarter of which he wrote when he was in his 60s and 70s.

His love of writing choral music came from his love of language, said his wife, Patricia Walker.

"He was beautifully read," she said. "He could have been an English teacher, he knew literature and poetry so well."

Mr. Binkerd began playing music at age 3, when he plopped onto his mother's piano bench in his hometown of Lynch, Neb.

"He wasn't a child prodigy," his wife said. "But he had a wonderful talent that he was born with."

Mr. Binkerd won a national competition for young pianists at 15, but turned to composition as a student at Dakota Wesleyan College in Mitchell, S.D.

In college, he was influenced heavily by composer Gail Kubik, who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for composition.

After graduating from college in 1937, he studied at the Eastman School of Music and studied for his doctorate at Harvard University. He married his wife in 1942 and served in the Navy during World War II.

Mr. Binkerd became a professor at the U. of I. in 1949 and published "Symphony No. 1" six years later. The piece was played by the Orchestra of America at Carnegie Hall in 1959 and later recorded by the St. Louis Symphony orchestra.

While at the U. of I., he became the first music professor to become a member of the school's prestigious Center for Advanced Study. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1959 and received an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964.

He retired from the university in 1971 to devote himself fully to writing music, his wife said.

Some former colleagues at the U. of I. described his work at the school as "conservative" and said he did not subscribe to the waves of experimental music that dominated the school in the 1950s and `60s.

"He used to get adamant about the lack of musical interest in what he called `sound specialists' rather than composers," said Thomas Fredrickson, a colleague and former director of the School of Music. "He wasn't into that at all."

But he and others said Mr. Binkerd's work as a choral music composer will sustain his reputation, if not enhance it.

"He has not come out with a big splash yet," Mr. Saladino said. "But that is to come."